Gearing Up

I don't know if anyone has noticed my nifty new countdown timer.  More than likely, you've noticed the weird ads that have popped up underneath it--unidentified, diseased-looking organs purportedly assailed by probiotics, allusions to Hillary's criminality, etc.  I swear I didn't put those there!  They came with the countdown timer.  They unfortunately make the timer, itself, look like an ad, but it's not.  It's supposed to be marking the hours until Trump is inaugurated, and my official year of action begins. 

Recently, however, I've been engaging in a lot of action to prepare for my upcoming actions.  I'm organizing a sister march to the Women's March on Washington, to be held in my small town on January 21.  Although I'd feel lucky if 50 people showed up, it's still taking a lot of coordination.  There are Facebook updates to post, conversation threads to weigh in on, flyers to print, local businesses to visit, calls to make.  I stopped by the sheriff's office the other day to see if there was anything I needed to do to to ensure the march didn't run afoul of the law.  The lady behind the glassed-in counter didn't know, but gave me some numbers to call.  She also leaned in close and confided that she really wished she could come herself, but she was concerned because of her job.  Attending a Women's March could be viewed as serious boat-rocking.  I offered to put her in a costume, she counter-offered to dress as a furry mascot of some sort, and we parted with laughs.

In Oakhurst, I'm told, this is a real concern.  It's not just that our town is overwhelmingly conservative.  It's that its conservative politics are laced with anger and inflexibility.  People do feel they need to keep quiet.  People do worry about their jobs.

Before Oakhurst, I lived in northwestern Montana.  It was far worse there, politically-speaking.  Here, I've been driving around with a Birdie bumper sticker for almost a year.  There, my tires would have been slashed by now, particularly in the rural areas that were my haunt for hiking and skiing.  One of my closest friends in Montana received a death threat in exchange for his environmental activism.  He also once opened his mailbox to find a bag of shit in it.  At the time I was living in Montana, a incendiary radio personality hosted an annual Earth Day burning of a giant green swastika in the radio station's front yard.

So, Oakhurst doesn't scare me.  Still, last night, at a gathering with a local peace group I belong to, veterans of the group shared some stories that caught my attention.  At a peace demonstration during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an enraged driver rammed his truck up onto the sidewalk in an attempt to get at the demonstrators.  Some were children.  Nobody got hurt, but I'm sure everyone got scared.  Others have been spit on while demonstrating.  That's just in our quiet little mountain town.  In Fresno, one of our group members reported, a silent peace demonstration nearly turned into a brawl.  The police had to be called in to break it up.

With my Women's March, I'm choosing not to dwell on the myriad backlash scenarios we may be facing.  I'm not saying there won't be backlash.  We will almost certainly experience angry horn honks and/or invective hurled from car windows.  Oakhurst isn't much of a pedestrian town, so it's less likely that we'll have face-to-face encounters with the opposition.  To be safe, though, we agreed at the gathering last night to re-approach the sheriff's office in a different way.  Rather than just trying to secure permits or whatnot to keep the March legit, we'll now be notifying the deputies that we might need their protection, or at least their watchful eye.  I want people--including families with children--to feel comfortable attending the March, and I want to feel wholly comfortable promoting it.  A little "Big Brother Watching" might be just what we need in this case.

I'm hoping to cultivate the March into a positive, proactive demonstration of what we wish to protect over the next four years (women's rights! civil rights! Native rights! safety and equality for minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ!).  I don't want to dwell on That Guy, even though I'm sure we would all love to personally punch him in the face.  It would be cool if his name didn't appear on a single sign.  God knows he gets enough press as it is.  It would be cool if even the most conservative of drivers-by had to really scratch his head on how to scream at us without looking like a complete ass.  I'm not naive; some assholes have no qualms about being racist, or sexist, or whatever.  But I'm hoping that our March, by focusing on big, humanizing issues that we will fight for rather than against, will serve more to bring our community together than to widen the divide.

Here is the flyer I made, and am feverishly distributing, for the Women's March on Washington - Oakhurst, CA.

Another item on the gearing-up agenda is that my beads arrived in the mail.  The package did not look like it contained $50 worth of merchandise.  It looked like it contained a very small paperback book.  I felt another pang of guilt for not having acquired my beads in a crunchier fashion.  I should have gone to a thrift store and bought a couple of old beaded necklaces for a couple of dollars!  I should have checked with crafty friends, worked out some kind of wine-for-beads trade!  I should have remembered that I had a small teacup on a forgotten shelf that has, for years, housed about a hundred multicollar beads that came off a necklace I used to love!

But no matter.  It is done.  My beads are beautiful and, as I said, they will keep me stringing for longer than just the first year, if I so choose.

This picture inflates the number of beads I got for $50, as I've added in about a dozen of my favorites from the forgotten teacup I mentioned.  This is an 8 oz. Mason jar.  Sigh.

I'm anticipating this will be my last post before Inauguration Day and my official start of action.  Thereafter, my posts will mostly serve to describe the weekly actions I'm taking:  Bead 1, Bead 2, Bead 3, etc.  I'm looking forward to ongoing discussion, stories, and shared tips from my fellow action-takers.  Year One, here we come!